Saturday, February 05, 2011
Laptop Woes!...
02/05/2011
The first computer anyone in my family ever owned was a Commodore 64. We bought it mostly to play exciting games like “Pong” and there was another on it I cannot recall name but the object was shoot invading dots of something from the sky before they hit the ground – all of this in magnificent black and white. After a while we moved into high tech and purchased a 486 model. We moved up to Donky Kong and PacMan, and in color, no less.
My foray in the world of laptops came in 1999, I think. A Toshiba graced my office and rarely ever left it, unless I was traveling. We accessed the internet through Sprint dial-up, it was slower than the US Postal Service and connection was never guaranteed. I had that one about two years and it was hopelessly outdated. Since the Toshiba days I have had three or four upgrades, and new models with additional capabilities. The one I use now is a Dell Latitude E6500, and my nimble fingers are artfully dancing across this keyboard codifying this masterpiece of nonsensical bull shit.
About a month ago I noticed I could not open the disc drive on this thing. I had to remove the whole unit and open the drawer manually, and then replace the unit in the slot it came out of. It was real pain in the posterior, if you get my drift, but then I rarely have to insert a disc for any reason. While at my company’s plant in Arkansas last month I got the IT dudes to take a look at it. They fixed the drive to operate as it should; however, shortly after getting back to my office the laptop began to do some weird things. For one, an error message pops up every once in a while telling me a USB port with an attached device has failed. Problem is there is nothing attached to any port, so I ignored the message.
Early last week while in my office the damn contraption (as I fondly refer to it) would not boot up. I pressed the start button, a fan would begin to run as some lights on the keyboard would flicker, followed by an exasperated hiss and an immediate complete shutdown. I quickly realized, being the computer giant that I have become, this was not a good thing. Over the weekend it seemed to be okay and I passed it off as an anomaly. Guess what? Anomaly my ass, this damn thing is screwed up.
I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky on Monday. The laptop performed as it should Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday it acted out and needed to be severely punished. It took me well over an hour to get this to boot. I so wanted to smash it to the floor and jump on it. Another call to our IT people and then to Dell saved it. I have a Dell technician coming to my house supposedly on Friday to replace the “processor” – whatever the hell that is.
I lived the first fifty-five years of my life without a laptop and got along quite nicely without it. Now, at the slightest faltering of this thing I panicked big time. I just knew life as I now know it was about to be interrupted big time. How in the hell did this happen? Just to think, this damn thing and my iPhone are always very close by me these days. I cannot watch TV at night without checking Facebook and email periodically. My iPhone dings every time I get an email, and I instantly grab for it to see who needs me. What is up with that? We all have been duped, conditioned! Pavlov would not have been surprised at how easily we have been conditioned. It’s nuts!
Retirement is just around the corner for this boy. I have already told Nancy I need to buy a laptop for my use when I turn this one in to my company. The iPhone is company property, as well. I wish I could live without both, but I am nothing more than a Microsoft robot these days just as much as the rest of you. God help us!
And that is all I have to say about that…